While I completely agree that lack of ability to distinguish between things doesn't equate to lack of difference, I yet point out that, regardless of whether or not we can distinguish between paid and unpaid autovotes, they both affect quality identically, which is to say, not at all.
A significant philosophical argument against votebots is that the appreciation of quality people apply in curation is not undertaken at all by extant bots. This results in the posts being upvoted by bots very different from those upvoted by human curators. It is incontrovertible that this is the case, and if there is consensus on any issue on Steemit, that is probably it.
There is a great deal of discussion, and a great many ways to change this, that can be essayed. Presently, however, I am aware of few that argue that votebots do push authors to produce quality posts. @markymark has pointed out instead that he can't be expected to police his bots clients. The thin margin of the industry precludes it.
"The bots don't use steemit.com, so a captcha will do nothing, literally nothing..."
Since you didn't follow the link to the conversation on @blocktrades recent post on making curation more profitable, in which @leotrap proposes including an 'authenticator' on posts, I will summarize here. The blockchain can be delivered a private key when a post is made. Votes on the post can then be required to possess a public key, just as votes you make require your personal key, or password.
A mechanism on the post itself can be used to provide the key, such as a captcha, which excludes bots while allowing people to gain the key. In this way bots can be prevented from voting, just as random people without a relevant password/key are prevented from voting.
Regarding censorship, making posts and comments invisible is censorship. There are degrees of censorship, from censorship with extreme prejudice, such as murder, to being demonetized on Youtool. While there are almost always ways to get the censored information, even from the dead, the fact that the blockchain still contains the information does not mean it isn't censored on Steemit.
@skeptic is now self-censoring the posts he makes in order to preclude being nuked - again - into negative rep. While very few would disagree that some of his posts were highly offensive, and that at least some of the flags were appropriate, he can tell you from his wealth of experience that being flagged into negative rep did indeed largely silence his voice, and that he now self-censors in order to prevent it happening again.
It is hard to understand, in that context, your position that flagging isn't censorship. It clearly is.
I always appreciate your insightful criticism. It is only through criticism that I am enabled to learn I am wrong, to change my mind, and become right.
Thanks!
Quality is inherent in a post, but subjectively evaluated. I can set my bot for example to vote for stuff that loosely fits my own quality ideals. It will be like me voting while operating at the brain capacity of a massive hangover, but it is not promotion, and the judgement is not irrespective of quality.
@denmarkguy made a good central point which I think you have failed to expand from just applying to pay4vote services to applying to all bots. That not all bots have any intelligence does not mean that some bots do not have some amount. Central to his argument too was the fact that pay4vote often (maybe nearly always, I don't have the data) goes back to the person paying for the vote, so it is an indirect self vote, which is best understood as promotion. I know this is a controversial topic we could get lost in, but to bring it back to point, using a bot does not necessarily make it promotion which is your assertion.
My apologies on not following the link, I saw it was an article I've already read with great interest several times, I didn't realize it was a comment you were linking to. I've read it now and I'm caught up.
However there is nothing there, and @netuoso is not even correct enough, it's shot down way easier than using Amazon's Mechanical Turk for a few months. Where it fails is "a mechanism on the post itself". What is this mechanism? How can it be a captcha, when posts are just text? So is it a link? If it is a link that goes to another site then that makes the blockchain dependent on that site to operate votes. And if people want to opt out / not use the captcha, do they still have to use a key? Do they just include it in the post? It is not implementable, never mind defeatible.
Making posts and comments less visible (they do not become invisible, even on steemit.com) is not censorship, it is deprioritizing them in the interface. It's not censorship to have to click again to reveal the contents of a post and it's images. If it were, then having to accept a terms and conditions page is censorship. It amounts to filtering of something which the community has decided is not valuable, literally not valued.
Side note but personally, and I've said this before, I think posts should be color coded instead of reduced in visibility, and that you'd be able to filter out posts that had low or negative rewards, but only by choice. It would be cool too because if you're the kind of person who likes to look out for posts which may have been down voted but that you might support, it would help you find them.
So we note that reducing post visibility is the consequence of negative rewards, it's all about the rewards. steemit.com chooses (they don't have to) reduce visibility and filter posts with negative pending paying. In the case of @skeptic the causality was largely economic, it was the same for @noganoo. They found out that what they posted was not valued by the community. I don't believe the reduced visibility was the clincher, although it no doubt played a part, but when you are not getting rewards for your posts you sit up and take notice. Now, I know that it was largely the actions of a few whales here that flagged him so much, hence the quotes, but conversely it's largely by the actions of whales that some posts get highly rewarded. I've argued for improvements to this, as have you, so I'm just stating the facts here.
They have to "self-censor", if you want to call it that, as it's the only way to be accepted by this community. A better way to think about it is them discovering what works here, what are people interested in discussing and what will they not tolerate. You can bet that @skeptic in particular is not censoring himself on other sites, if I remember correctly he went to another site with mind in the name and continued much as he had been here.
Thanks also for the discussion, as always.